The Ollie Comics have sold out!
This is a picture of my daughter helping me put copies of The Ollie Comics into the mailbox at the post office. Here she is carried by my wife and is perhaps about 3 years old in 2017. She is now 11 years old. This picture isn't in my usual loose style of drawing, is it? I used a different process to draw this.
Below is what the illustration looks like before I edited the colours in Photoshop and Lightroom. The process does change the outcome. Although I've only practiced this process/technique a handful of times, I'm still impressed with the results.
This is how I did it. Using my inkjet, I printed the photo in colour onto brown craft paper. Then I painted over it with gesso. I'm still able to see the image through the layer of white gesso. I used the image as a guide and painted over that with gouache or acrylic. (I think it was gouache, but both will work.) Then I added the pencil outlines, basically tracing the shapes best I could. The textures this technique produces is nice and I get an almost photorealistic illustrated image. And if you don't like how the colours turn out, you can edit the colours in photoshop like I did.
By the way, the printed version of The Ollie Comics have sold out! If you've bought yourself a copy, thank you so much! I hope you enjoyed reading my stories. I do have some remaining copies left, but they have slight blemishes, mainly on the front and back cover and sometimes on the sides of the book. But the inside pages look fine. I've lowered the price of these copies with aesthetic blemishes from US$18 to US$8 + shipping. If you are interested in purchasing these copies, please use this link: https://www.drewscape.net/theolliecomics.html
Comments
It was interesting to see a more polished style from you. I noticed that your comics and illustrations with a looser style are so convincing in part because the perspective and anatomy are always spot on.
Did you spend a lot of time studying perspective and anatomy before you were able to develop that kind of ease in your work?
Best wishes, and thanks as always for the constant inspiration.
Malte
I’ve noticed that when I draw in a loose style, I sometimes push the wiggle room a bit too far, and the drawing ends up looking kinda weird. That’s why I figured I need to really understand realistic anatomy first—so I can simplify, leave things out, and still make it look solid.
But your video about seeing shapes rather than objects really helped me loosen up a bit and stop thinking so much in terms of individual body parts.